Bitter Orange

by Claire Fuller

  ‘Well, I can promise you there are no treasures in the attic at Lyntons,’ I said to Peter. ‘Unless you count a few dead mice.’

  ‘I don’t think they’d go for much at auction. Although at Sotheby’s we once sold a Dürer engraving of Adam and Eve. Eve had a cat curled around her feet, and Adam was treading on the tail of a mouse.’ Peter took out his cigarettes and shook one from the packet.

  I put the book back on the shelf. ‘Do you think …? Could I?’ I stretched my hand towards the packet.

  Peter raised his eyebrows but said nothing, only shaking another out and lighting it for me.

  ‘You were at Sotheby’s?’ I said, trying not to cough.

  ‘For a while. I went there straight from school. I wangled a letter of introduction to the chairman. My father wasn’t too happy when he found out.’

  ‘He wasn’t pleased for you? Proud?’

  ‘He wanted me to take over the shop, but God, the customers would have driven me mad. Those women in their pearls with lipstick on their teeth, and the men coming down from London, hoping to pull one over on my father. Anyway, I just needed to get out of that town. Stultifying.’ His hands made a gripping action.

  I dipped my head. He might have been reading my memory of my father. ‘A restless young man, then?’

  ‘I suppose. Although I think it’s Cara who’s been the most restless. Striving for something more.’

  I wanted to say, Aren’t we all. I wanted to tell him how it had been with Mother in London during those years, the change in her, the airless rooms, the boredom that books and self-education relieved, her moaning first in criticism, later in pain, but instead I said, ‘You’re worried about her?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ His tone was serious. ‘I’m saying she’s fragile; she hoped for one thing and ended up with another.’ He stood and took a step towards me. ‘Actually, I wanted to ask for your help. I know I can trust you, Fran.’

  I waited, resting one elbow on my other hand, the cigarette raised, then, self-conscious, dropping my arm to my hip, cigarette dangling. I would have said yes to anything.

  ‘Cara sees the world differently from you and me. She might say things …’ He paused, considering his words. ‘About what happened … She likes to retell, change things. It’s just her way. You know the Irish, born storytellers.’

  ‘What things?’ I said.

  He picked up a loose page from under his shoe and blew dust from its surface. ‘I’m trying to encourage her to see someone again, but she’s resistant.’

  ‘A doctor, you mean? And you want me to persuade her? I’m not sure –’

  ‘No, no –’ He held his hand up as if to make me wait, and in the dark room I could just make out his eyes, screwed closed. He sneezed three times, each one a bark or a cough. He sniffed and patted his pockets, and I took from my shorts a clean, folded handkerchief and held it out to him.

  ‘Thank you.’ He blew his nose and put the hanky in his pocket.

  ‘I’m just asking for your help to keep an eye on her.’ His voice dropped. ‘Let me know if she says or does anything … silly. I can’t watch her all the time.’

  ‘Silly?’ I said. ‘Silly in what way?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, although I thought he did. ‘Anything.’

  I would have pressed him, but we heard Cara calling. When I looked beyond the doorway, out to the garden, the sun had set and the sky was mauve.

  We ate again at their makeshift table, drinking Mr Liebermann’s wine out of the tin cups and talking late into the night about the houses they had stayed in, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the places Peter had visited. The cigarettes tasted good.

  I watched Cara for the fragility Peter had mentioned and I had seen through the judas hole and in the church, but I saw none of it that evening. She was full of life and she was happy, and the glow she gave off spread over us all. I watched Peter too, to see if he spoke to me with a new intimacy, whether he regarded me differently after what we had shared in the library, and I believed he did.

  10

  Over the next few days I ate all my meals with Peter and Cara. The weather stayed warm and I avoided my attic room, which trapped the heat under the lead roof, even with the window open. I adapted to their clock, settling into a routine of rising late, taking breakfast – peaches and coffee, pastries and figs, eggs and soldiers – in the shade of the portico. Often, we didn’t bother with the makeshift chairs and table, and sat instead on the steps, Cara resting against Peter’s legs, the three of us smoking and contemplating the ruined lawns, the overgrown flowerbeds and the trees that surrounded the lake. If we spoke it was for Cara and me to tell stories about what Lyntons would have been like when it was filled with servants, when carriages pulled up to the front door, and when there had been an unimpeded view of the water.

  For a day or so it seemed miraculous that they welcomed my company and that I was able to relax in theirs. I wondered why it had never been like this for me before. Had I changed? Then, after a while, I stopped noticing and accepted it, and was happy.

  ‘I thought I might go and clear some of the undergrowth off the bridge,’ Peter said after breakfast on the Thursday. He stood up so that Cara had to lean forward.

  ‘What, now?’ she said, shading her eyes and looking up at him.

  ‘That sounds like a good idea.’ I stretched. ‘I could do with some exercise.’

  ‘Sounds like hard work,’ Cara said, lying back again.

  ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ Peter gave her a nudge with his foot. ‘It’ll be cooler down there. You can watch us work.’

  She stared at us as though she thought we were plotting something. Peter put his hand out to her and, with a sigh, she let him pull her up.

  We took some of the tools Peter had found and sharpened, and we were beside the Nissen huts when Cara said, ‘Actually, I think I’ll cycle into town. We need something for lunch.’ She said it to Peter like a challenge, daring him to make her come with us to the bridge.

  ‘If you’re sure?’ he said, while I looked between them, trying to understand what they weren’t saying.

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said, wrapping the sacking she was carrying around my neck like a scarf. ‘Don’t look so horrified, Fran.’ She smiled. ‘And don’t worry, I’ll be back in an hour or two,’ she said to Peter. ‘If not, you can send out the search party.’ When he didn’t smile, she said, ‘For God’s sake, I’m cycling into town.’ And she strode off towards the house.

  When we reached the bridge Peter was enthusiastic, saying that he thought it could be Palladian, something about the span of the arches, the Italian elegance of the balusters. I wasn’t convinced, and at first I pulled half-heartedly at the ivy and hacked at a few brambles as if it were a hopeless undertaking. But after a while Peter’s energy and excitement enthused me too, and I began to enjoy the physical activity until it didn’t matter what sort of bridge we were clearing. We worked for two or three hours, speaking only when one of us needed help or after we had uncovered a bit more. When we had packed up and were walking to the house, I glanced back. The stone was whiter where we had pulled away the plants, the arches a little more defined and elegant, and I thought that perhaps he was right: maybe we had discovered a Palladian bridge.

  Cara was already home when we returned to wash our hands in their bathroom sink. As I turned on the taps I was aware of the domed ceiling and the glass eye above my head. I didn’t look up. Laid out on the table in their sitting room was a trout Cara said an angler she’d cycled past had given her, a clutch of eggs bought from a farm gate, as well as cheese and bread she’d charmed from the farmer’s wife, and cigarettes for us all.

  We took the food, some wine and a blanket out to the shade of the mulberry tree, a lumpen and crooked specimen that grew in the middle of where a lawn had once been – the remains of the brick paths and flowerbeds around the edge could still be made out, although now the grass was rough and knee-high. We ate, and Peter opened a second bottle, and when we�
�d finished that, we lay back and slept. When I woke, Cara was sitting up, smoking. Peter had gone into the house to itemize the contents of a basement storeroom, she said, although I thought it more plausible that he was continuing to catalogue the wine. I thought I should go upstairs and read my notes or document the grotto, but the warm afternoon, the shadow patterns of the leaves upon us, and the wine all contrived to keep me there. I let Cara continue her story without me asking.

  ‘After Peter left Ireland, life went back to normal, more or less. Dermod doing the cooking and some cleaning, Isabel worrying about money, and me thinking I was never going to escape, and when I couldn’t stand it any longer, running across the fields to visit Paddy. Sometimes I let him hold my hand, but nothing more than that. The only change was that I got a job with Miss Landers, a blind woman who lived in the town. I went to her house twice a week to open her post for her, and write replies, and cheques, address envelopes, and I had to read her Woman’s Way aloud from cover to cover. It was a magazine we had in Ireland then; I haven’t seen it here. And afterwards she would dictate letters to the editor commenting on the articles I’d read aloud. She was elderly and Catholic, but not like any other old woman I knew. Her letters were about the benefits of sex education for girls, how contraception would help Ireland develop economically, or how unmarried mothers weren’t evil. The magazine paid a guinea for each letter they published, and every week Miss Landers hoped they’d print one of hers, but they never did, not then anyway.

  ‘I must have been going to her for about a month when Peter came back. His car was on the drive one day when I got home. I nearly ran away again, because I thought that seeing him would just stir everything up. I was resigned by then to staying in Ireland. I’d stopped hoping and sometimes life feels easier that way, doesn’t it? But of course I went in, and he was sitting in the drawing room just like last time, and when I saw him sitting there smiling, I was even more sure that I loved him, and I could see from his face that he loved me too.

  ‘He’d bought me a Christmas present – an Italian recipe book. Isabel wasn’t pleased – he hadn’t thought to bring her anything. He said he’d got it in an auction that he’d been to where they’d been selling off the contents of one of the big houses in County Kildare or somewhere, a couple of weeks before, and when I heard that I couldn’t believe he’d been in the country, in Ireland, all that time and hadn’t come to see me. His job in those days was to go around the big houses and persuade the owners to sell their libraries or paintings. He’d go to sales to buy things he knew there was a market for, or he looked for houses and land that could be developed into hotels or golf clubs. He wasn’t looking for himself, but he never told Isabel that. She was still half hoping he’d buy Killaspy, or marry her.’

  Under the mulberry tree the shade had moved and I moved with it to see Cara better. ‘But he wasn’t planning on ever doing that, was he?’ I said.

  ‘No, but then Peter never really makes plans. He just lets things happen. I think though, that day in the drawing room, Isabel must have seen how we were staring at each other, because the first thing she said was something like, “You remember my daughter, Cara. She’s just become engaged to Paddy Browne. Isn’t that wonderful – a spring wedding?”

  ‘I remember the colour draining out of Peter’s face, because it was true, I had agreed to marry Paddy. It had felt at the time like there was no alternative. Peter stood up and shook my hand, and said, “Many congratulations, Miss Calace,” in such a dead voice I could have cried.

  ‘There was chicken again for supper, but I got Dermod to tell Isabel that I had a headache and wouldn’t be down. I couldn’t bear to see Peter’s expression. I sat at my bedroom window, and waited until I heard everyone go to bed, and then I went downstairs in my nightdress and ripped a leg off the chicken carcass that Dermod had left covered in the larder. I sat shivering on the counter and ate it in the dark, and when I’d finished it, Peter came in. I knew it was him just from his outline.

  ‘He shut the larder door and said, “You’re going to marry Paddy, are you?” Or something. “A farm boy.” He sounded heartbroken. “I like cows,” I said, just to annoy him. I said that Paddy wasn’t a farm boy, that he would have ten head of cattle when he inherited the farm, even though inside I couldn’t bear the idea that if I married him my whole future was laid out, as though someone had carved my next fifty years in stone. Peter said, “You’ll be a farmer’s wife in rural Ireland. What happened to your dreams of Italy?” He cracked that lump of stone, a tiny gap to begin with, but enough.

  ‘I asked whether he was offering to take me, but he didn’t answer; he just moved a step closer and we kissed. That was the first time, in the larder. He said I tasted of butter and chicken. I so badly wanted us to make love, I opened my legs and sort of hooked my ankles around the backs of his knees until he was pressed into me, but he said, “Not now. Not in the larder.” ’

  Cara caught my eye and she started laughing, a naughty kind of laugh, and I started laughing too, until we were doubled over, shaking with the thought of it, and then we fell backwards on to the blanket.

  ‘We didn’t promise each other anything,’ she said after we had calmed down. ‘Peter didn’t say he would stay in Ireland, and I didn’t say I’d break off my engagement to Paddy. Isabel carried on hoping that either Peter was interested in her or he was going to buy Killaspy. He was uneasy about deceiving her, but I wanted him to stay in the house, and I wanted to keep him there for as long as possible. We met every night in the larder, and went for drives in his car. I told Paddy I was busy with Miss Landers.

  ‘It was the morning he was due to leave, Christmas Eve, that I wrote “wife” on the misted-up passenger window. It was only a guess, but he stretched across me to rub the word out and said he didn’t want to talk about it, her. Peter might be able to rattle on about all sorts of things, but there are some subjects that he just bloody clams up about – emotions and relationships and, I don’t know, real life. Under that charming exterior is a buttoned-up, straight-laced, old-fashioned man. I said he could get a divorce, couldn’t he, or what were we doing sitting in his car every afternoon, holding hands and steaming up the windows? And he said he didn’t understand how sometimes I acted like I was Catholic and then, when it was convenient, I was allowed to be Protestant. And I said I could do what I bloody well liked, it was my religion. And that was our first argument, I suppose. We were both shouting, even though all I’d ever wanted was to touch him, you know, properly, and for him to touch me back. Once, I saw him on the landing in just a towel – he must have thought we were all out – and I spent the whole night wondering what it would be like when we slept together. I was certain we would.

  ‘Anyway, in that tiny little car our argument became so nasty, so horrible, that I opened the door and ran off. I just ran away. It was raining, pouring down. Peter came after me, but I kept running and I heard him shout, “Where are you going?” But I kept on and without stopping I shouted back, “Italy!” although I don’t think he heard.

  ‘I didn’t know where we were. On our drives Peter would come to a junction and I would call “right” or “left”, however the mood took me, until I thought we must be lost in the middle of the Irish countryside, but he always knew, he could always drive me straight home. When I got out of the car I had no idea where we were. It was winter and freezing, and although I was marching along I was wet and cold, and all of me was shaking. But I kept on going. I planned to carry on walking until I fell into a ditch, and the next day, or the next week, or sometime in the future, they would find my body and then they would feel guilty: Peter, Isabel and Paddy. It was Dermod I worried about though: he needed someone to look out for him. I walked for an hour, it was dark by then and still raining, but eventually headlights came towards me and I saw it was the little green sports car. Peter was angry with me for running away, but mostly because he thought I might catch a chill and die, the ninny. I couldn’t speak, I was so cold. He got the blanket out o
f the boot, sat me in the front seat and turned the heating on full, but I was shaking, frozen to the core, and I actually thought I might die. I tried to take off my wet clothes, but because my fingers were numb and wouldn’t work Peter had to undress me, making me lift up my arms or my bottom, and then he wrapped me in the blanket and just held me. It was tricky across the handbrake and gear stick, with those bucket seats, and although I was still cold, I was sure he would make love to me then, now he’d seen me with no clothes on, now he’d undressed me, but once I’d stopped shivering he drove me home, back to Killaspy.’

  She let out a long sigh, and turned over on to her stomach, head resting on her folded arms. ‘Is this too personal for you, Frances? Please say if it’s too personal.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I really don’t mind. I mean, it’s fine.’ It was personal. I had never considered what people might look like under their clothes, or how complicated other people’s lives were when they appeared so simple and perfect from the outside.

  ‘Only, I do so love our conversations,’ she said.

  On one of those afternoons that we spent under the mulberry tree, after we’d eaten and drunk and slept, I took Peter and Cara to the mausoleum. We climbed the tower and gazed out, but they were more interested in the tombs at the bottom. I showed them the punched-out chests of the stone wives.

  ‘Two wives?’ Cara said, inspecting their faces. We had brought candles with us, and they threw shadows on the walls that stretched and arched as we moved about the room.

  ‘One after the other, I should think,’ I said. ‘Not both at once.’